by Deni Béchard
As I sat beneath the trees, a memory resurfaced: a night I couldn’t place, that I was afraid to ask about. It seemed distant, like a bad dream after waking, but vivid, constant in my recollection. There was a house where we’d stayed, at a river ferry crossing on an Indian reservation. My father and mother had spoken in hushed tones. Was this years ago? I’d wanted to know what was happening, and he’d told me that a man was coming to fight him.
“I want to fight, too.”
“You’re too little.”
“No! Let me fight.”
“Okay. Maybe. You just wait inside. Maybe you can help me.”
“You promise?”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling at me. “All right. I’ll probably need your help.”
I sat on the couch as he paced the small living room, stopping only to draw back the curtain and look out at the gravel driveway and the dark road to the ferry landing. The man who was coming had worked for him and wanted money he didn’t deserve. My father had told me stories about fighting. He always made it sound fun, and I was desperate to hit the man, too.
“He’ll be here soon,” my father said and prowled back and forth, hunched like an angry dog. His rage burned into the air so that I breathed and tasted it.
But then I was opening my eyes, lifting my face from the cushion, rubbing my cheek.
He’d come in the door, dark red gouges on the skin around his eyes, the collar of his shirt torn. He picked up the telephone’s black receiver. Blood covered his knuckles.
“He’s knocked out,” he told my mother. “I knocked him out.”
“What happened?”
“She jumped on my back. His girlfriend—she tried to scratch my eyes.”
“She’s out there?”
“I broke her jaw. I didn’t mean to. She jumped on my back.”
My mother just stared.
“I wanted to fight,” I shouted and began to cry.
She hurried to the couch and lay me back against the pillow.
“Go to sleep,” she told me, her voice stern. There was a tension in her face that I knew from my father’s rages, when he was angry at her, though he wasn’t now.
“I didn’t mean to,” he kept saying. He was holding the phone.
I understood that outside the man and his girlfriend lay on the dark gravel.
My father dialed and spoke into the phone, telling what had happened, that two people had come onto his property.
Then I was waking again. Red and blue lights flashed outside, rippling in the folds of the curtains. My father was putting on his jacket, the door opening, cold night air and the smell of the river washing into the room.
After the fight by the ferry, there’d been a visit to court, my brother and I neatly dressed, our mother grim and silent, trying to keep us quiet, giving us the candy she usually forbade, rotting out our teeth and bones, turning us into retards.
Maybe the police had come to the valley because he’d beaten someone up again. Or the train engineers had complained. But now that I was listening and watching, I realized that something had changed, my mother withdrawn, my father—when he was home—like a watchdog in the seconds before it snarled. If I could read minds, I might make sense of the shouting that woke me at night, the slammed doors, my mother crossing the house, naked but for a blanket wrapped around her, telling him to leave her alone.
Sometimes the fights were obvious: he got angry when she cooked strange meals like boiled oranges and rice, or he told her to stop nagging him for having shared his vodka with me. He’d let me have a swig on a fishing trip, and, proud of how much I could handle, I’d snuck more, the bottle lifted above my face, a shimmering bubble rising with each gulp. My brother called out to my father, who snatched it from my hand. I became drowsy and passed out, but at school I bragged that my father had let me get drunk. My mother turned the color of chalk when she heard me say this, and my father later reminded me that drinking was one of our secrets. But everything was becoming a secret. Even most of their fights were mysterious. They just had to look at each other and they started yelling.
So maybe she knew. Maybe she’d discovered he was in trouble. I wondered how long it would be before the police returned.
We were driving to get the mail, the five of us, my father at the wheel, my mother holding my sister on her lap, my brother and I wedged in between.
Large, distant mountains stood at the horizon, the highest already white. A few rusty leaves still clung to the roadside trees, and as we drove, sunlight broke in along the clouds, flashing over the hood of the truck.
The post office was a two-story building next to the muddy slough near where I was born, just outside the valley. A brass bell rang when we opened the door. The owner, a soft-looking, bespectacled man who lived up a set of creaky stairs, was reading the paper. He got up from his stool, pushed his glasses high on the bridge of his nose, and gazed at the wooden pigeonholes on the wall. He took down a sheaf of letters.
I followed my father back outside and down the steps. He stood in the sunlight as he tore the envelopes open. One held a flowery card. He stared into it. I’d never seen him get mail like this, and I stepped in close but still couldn’t make out the words.
“What is it?”
My mother laughed. “It’s from his other family.”
The skin of his neck flushed. He didn’t appear to breathe.
“What other family?” I asked. I had no idea what she meant, and I looked up at him, trying to see inside the card. He never talked about his parents the way she talked about hers. But he didn’t respond, and she stared at the ground and sighed. “It was just a joke. I was just joking.”
He folded the card and put it in his jacket pocket, and we got in his truck and left. But I couldn’t stop wondering what had made him so angry. We often received cards from my mother’s parents in Pittsburgh, but this was the first time I’d seen him get one. Though I knew he was from Quebec, he almost never spoke about where he’d grown up, other than to say, “My brother and me, we beat up all the kids in our village, so you and your brother should stick together.” And then he’d look a little angry, probably because of all the fights he’d been in.
It was frustrating. I knew almost nothing about him. Why hadn’t I realized this before? Did he keep secrets from me the way he did from her? The only time I thought about where he came from was at school, because that’s where we spoke French and often read about Quebec. My mother loved French but didn’t speak it, and she told me that my father grew up speaking it even if he almost never did now. He claimed it was useless, but she insisted on making us learn it. Though French classes weren’t offered when my brother started school, they were the year I began.
That evening, as I did my homework, I couldn’t stop trying to make sense of the card and his other family. I approached the chair where he watched TV.
“Est-ce que tu peux m’aider avec mes devoirs?” I said. If he checked my homework and spoke in French, I might figure something out. Maybe there were questions I could ask in French that I couldn’t in English. Besides, I was always curious to hear his voice change.
“Okay, viens,” he told me, but as soon as my workbook came into his big, dark hands, he furrowed his brow. His eyelids drooped, his expression guilty, as if he’d lied. He hunched in his chair as I rattled away, explaining the assignment. When I stopped, he made a suggestion on how to write a sentence, but I was pretty sure he was wrong, and I corrected him.
He lowered the book and stared at the TV. Black smoke rose from an aerial view of a city. He seemed upset, as if this were a place he knew. All around him hummed familiar danger, the electric buzz of his irritation, and I didn’t move or speak.
When he switched to English and said, “This isn’t a good time,” I felt relieved.
My mother had clear blue eyes, not dark like his, and silvery stripes in her light brown hair that, when she pulled it back in a ponytail, reminded me of the markings on a cat.
“Whose eyes do I hav
e?” I asked. We were alone in the kitchen while she made goat cheese and I pretended to do my homework, my brother and sister watching TV, my father gone. I spoke as if the question weren’t a big deal, though my teacher had made us read about eye color and told us that to have blue eyes the genes had to come from both parents. My mother said that mine were probably from her, unless someone in my father’s family also had blue eyes, but she didn’t know. I didn’t bother to explain how it really worked and asked, “Why don’t you know?”
“Because I’ve never met them. He’s not close to them anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t really know. He didn’t get along with them. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Oh,” I said, grudgingly, surprised that even she didn’t know much about him. I fiddled with my pencil and considered my workbook. “And whose hair do I have?”
“I had blond hair when I was younger.”
“And my nose.” She’d often told me that I was lucky not to have her small nose. She called it a ski jump, though I saw nothing wrong with it.
“Your nose is your father’s. You have his real nose.”
“His real nose?” I repeated. “His nose isn’t real?”
She was always doing this—telling me shocking things.
“He had his real nose smashed in a fight. Doctors rebuilt it and gave him a new one that’s smaller and very straight. I never saw his real one, but I’m sure you’ll have it when you grow up.”
I looked down at my workbook. I was sitting at a picnic table, the kind you saw in parks but never in other kids’ houses. My life was nothing like other kids’. I never said “Mom” and “Dad,” but “André” and “Bonnie,” and no one I knew had changed homes so often. Every winter, we used to move to places with heat, rundown houses where my father got electricity using jumper cables, clipping the ends above and below the meter after stripping away the rubber. Summers, we’d stayed in a trailer on blocks in the valley, goats and German shepherds in pens outside, my first memories sunlit days and broken-down motors, the mountain just above us, no electricity or running water, and our drinks in wire milk crates set in the stream.
From my mother’s stories, I knew she’d gone to art school in Virginia but had run away with a draft dodger. I pictured a guy really good at dodgeball, but, as if angry, she said he was dodging war, not balls. She met my father in Vancouver while working as a waitress, an encounter that—because he’d once described it to me as “She served me ham and eggs, and I left with her”—made me hungry whenever I thought about it. After that, they’d traveled British Columbia, living out of a van and fishing, an existence I fantasized about—mornings waking up and going straight outside to the river, no bedroom to clean, no school to worry about. But they’d decided to settle down and have children, and my perfect life ended just before I was born.
Whenever I asked her questions—about war or why it’s wrong—she answered carefully, explaining with so many details—Vietnam, corrupt government, the loss of individual freedom—that I didn’t understand much. She never talked to me like I was a child, but as if I were a very old and serious man, and so I sat and listened, trying to remember the big words she used. And then, to let off some steam, I asked her to retell The Little Engine That Could, and she did, though she seemed much less interested in this than in the world’s problems.
As opposed to my mother, whenever I asked my father about his family, he barely answered. “Why don’t you like to speak French?” or “What did your parents do?” earned me few words: “There’s no point,” or “He fished. She took care of the kids.” And then he’d tell me how he’d traveled cross-country to Calgary and gone to a party and got in a terrible fight over a beautiful woman.
“This bruiser,” he said, “was two or three times as big as me. We were throwing each other across the room. We broke the table and chairs and knocked all the pictures off the walls. There wasn’t anything we didn’t break. That guy was really tough, but I just didn’t let myself get worried. You get worried in a fight, and you’ve had it. So I kept hitting him, and pretty soon everyone at the party started cheering me. They were originally his friends, but he was arrogant, and I was the better fighter. They could see that, so I guess they wanted to be on my side. Each time I got him down, I’d say, ‘Stay down,’ and everyone else would shout, ‘Stay down,’ but he’d get up, and then I’d hit him five or six times, and he’d fall on his ass again, and everyone would yell, ‘Stay down.’ I tried to be nice, but that guy was really big, and he kept shaking his head and trying to get back up and then I’d have to hit him again. It wasn’t easy, but I finally made him understand.”
By this point I no longer remembered my original question, and I asked him if he’d had worse fights, and he told one story after another. His confrontations with bruisers, this being one of his favorite words, often had strange endings.
“The bruiser was so strong I had to bite his nose to win. We were on the docks, by the fishing boats, and I got him down and bit his nose and just hung on until he started crying. Sometimes you have to do things like that to win a fight.”
He told me about journeys, from Calgary to Tijuana in a truck without brakes, or driving an old Model T along Alaskan railways to get to towns not connected by roads. Whenever a train came, he swerved off the tracks, and afterward he and his friends hefted the Model T back on.
My favorite was the time he and a friend were driving through Nevada and picked up a Mormon. He drove so fast that the Mormon prayed in the backseat and wept to the Lord until my father, racing at over a hundred miles an hour, slammed the brakes. The Mormon flew onto the dash, his back against the windshield so that the car was briefly dark and all my father saw was his screaming face. The friend kicked open his door and they chucked the Mormon out. The man grabbed at the earth, kissing it—“Like the goddamn pope,” my father said.
I didn’t know what a Mormon was, but I’d seen the pope on TV, descending from an airplane and kissing the ground.
“I bet dogs pissed all over that ground,” my father had told me and changed the channel.
Neither Mormons nor the pope could be too bright or brave. Hearing his descriptions, I forgot about my questions and his secrets. Reckless speed and the thought of untamed distance thrilled in my blood.
The proof that his stories were true was his madness. He raced through traffic or hit large puddles with such speed that his truck appeared to have wings of muddy water and sputtered until its engine dried. Watching TV, he contemplated Evel Knievel, who, dressed in his cape and the shirt with crossed lines of stars, jumped his motorcycle over buses. Though he calculated how difficult this would be, he preferred Houdini. Having seen a documentary on him, he discussed ways of escaping handcuffs, live burial, and torture cells.
Yet many of his exploits had involved not escaping torture but subjecting us to it. In the mall, when I was four, he’d hidden, standing with mannequins in a window, arms lifted and motionless, head cocked at an angle as he stared into space. He blended in perfectly, his posture so convincing that my brother and I walked past him repeatedly, crying as we called out his name. Only when a woman stopped to help us did we see the mannequin in the display leave its place and hurry toward us, laughing.
Or once he took my brother and me to a store that he intended to rent. Though he ran Christmas tree lots each winter, he also had three seafood shops in the city and wanted to open more. But while we snooped in back, he locked us in and hid outside. My brother was six or seven and, having taken on the role of voicing our terror, pounded on a window until it cracked. My father loomed in the broken glass. His key ring jangled against the door right before he threw it open and spanked us for acting like babies. But as he tried to strike me, I struggled and shouted, “I wasn’t crying!” Even afterward, following him back to the truck, I was enraged, yelling, “I wasn’t crying!” until he turned and glared at me and said, “Okay. That’s enough!”
Train racing was more frequ
ent and always fun, though he did it rarely now, unlike when I was little. Sometimes he didn’t stop, just raced in front, swerving past the gate, striking the embankment like a ramp and sailing to the road with the clatter of rusted shocks. Or he waited on the tracks, though under normal circumstances his battered truck was known to stall or refuse to start. He even got out once, pocketing his keys after telling us to wait. We screamed as the train heaved into sight. We beat on the windows and called, “André! André!” until he hurried back and jumped behind the wheel and pretended to turn the key, yelling, “It won’t start!” But finally the engine fired, and we screeched from the tracks.
Only later did I wonder why we loved danger so much, why my mother hated this feeling that made me happier than anything else.
Usually when I woke up, my father had already gone to his stores, and he returned after I was in bed. But some mornings before school, if his truck was in the driveway, I searched the misted rows of pines through our windows. His figure passed between them, followed by the swift movement of his German shepherds, all soon obscured by rain.
The November of my fourth grade, while he worked his tree lots, I worried that the salmon runs would end and checked spawning dates in the books I’d hoarded from the school library. He and I used to fish often, in the streams between the fields or in the reservoir outside the valley, but he had less and less time and often wasn’t even around, so I couldn’t ask. I lay in bed, looking at pictures of fish—the toothy great barracuda or the gaping goosefish with its antennae. Their mystery riveted me, the way they appeared from the deepest, darkest water and vanished again, how they belonged to a different world. I wanted nothing more than to catch one, for my father and me to go to the river the way we used to and stand together and then laugh over what we’d caught.